It’s official – it’s the most wonderful time of the year! Which, of course, also means that for the second year in a row it’s time to launch our Online Christmas Shop, a specially curated selection of delicious Christmas treats for gifts or for your own delectation.
Introducing the online Christmas shop for 2021
We’ve worked super hard on perfecting our festive offerings for 2021, and have come up with four mouthwatering options that are the perfect balance of Yuletide and yummy. These include our festive afternoon teas; gingerbread man gifts; macarons, and our boozy Christmas cake slices too.
As a mother and daughter duo, everything we do at Bluebell Kitchen is incredibly personal and usually has a bit of a story alongside it; and our online Christmas shop is no exception. We thought we’d share that with you today – so are you sitting comfortably? Perhaps with a mulled wine, and one of our festive treats…
The story behind it
To tell you the truth, our online Christmas shop came about by chance.
Thanks (but no thanks!) to COVID-19, with the exception of just three, all of our planned weddings for 2020 were postponed to either 2021 or 2022. Instead, during the first lockdown, we decided to open an online shop selling afternoon teas and ‘unbirthday’ cakes, which are a bit of a tradition in our family. (If you’re wondering what they are, you can find out more about them here, but what’s important to know is that they always taste the best when a treat is needed!) People were intrigued, and ordered them to find out what they’d been missing out on all of their lives.
Buoyed by the generous success of this first foray into postal orders, we decided we’d take it a bit further at the end of the year and set up a Christmas shop, perfect for people looking for Christmas treats for gifts. We didn’t know much about selling online – we didn’t know what SEO was (thanks Maddy Shine for quickly putting us right on this), didn’t understand what everyone was talking about when they mentioned keywords, and weren’t really sure how to market it. But what we did know is that we make damn good cake, so we contacted all of our recent or current clients to let them know what we had in the offing.
Because we have the best couples in the world – that’s a fact – they were our biggest cheerleaders and were hugely supportive of our new endeavour. After a special launch weekend offer and an exclusive first offer to our current wedding clients, we then opened the shop up for everyone else to see. We had launched to the world!
Then, in early December 2020, we were so honoured to be a part of Janet Murray’s Online Christmas Market, which took place over a week on Facebook live and can also be found on Youtube. It was in the style of a shopping channel like QVC, and we’re not ashamed to admit that we got a tad addicted to watching the shopping channels whilst researching how to present ourselves! It was an amazing opportunity as it really helped build our confidence with Instagram and facebook live – you might have noticed we pop up quite a lot more now.
Here we are, skip to 40 mins when we appear, no sound (which we soon sort out) and then really get into our stride!
Word of our online shop snowballed – pardon the pun – as we were then featured on BBC Radio Kent, and more and more people purchased our Christmas treats for gifts (or, just for themselves – absolutely no judgement either way!) In fact, it was so successful that we did something very similar for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day this year, when we actually sold out of our afternoon teas.
Delicious Christmas treats for gifts
So, without further ado: we’re thrilled to announce that our online Christmas shop is open once more! There’s something so special about giving delicious Christmas treats for gifts, and we know that your loved ones will adore our freshly-baked festive afternoon teas, gingerbread, macarons and boozy Christmas cake slices. As everything is made by hand and with loads of love, they are limited in quantity, so make sure to secure yours by heading here, before they run out.
Happy Christmas (shopping)!
We are Erica and Charlie Bell, a mother-daughter team creating breathtaking wedding cakes and macarons from our studio in Maidstone, Kent. We love nothing more than getting to know our couples, and creating distinctive designs that are inventive and imaginative. Our one-of-a-kind cakes that are designed down to the very last (sugar) detail. We deliver across London, Kent, Essex, Surrey, Sussex and beyond.
